Wednesday, February 6, 2013

When It Comes to Genuine Threats to Jewry, Scary Aryans Can't Hold a Candle to Islamists, Progressives and Zion-Deriding Jews

Canadian Nazi hunters rejoice--there are signs, claims Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, that the Aryan menace is rearing its ugly head once more:

In recent years, a seemingly long-dormant ideology returned to a semblance of power for the first time since the unconditional surrender of German forces on May 8, 1945. For the first time in well over six decades, political parties that require members to be of “Aryan origin,” have full-armed and open-fisted salutes, have logos distinctly resembling the swastika and call for a census of Jews are back in Europe.

These elements are no longer consigned to the beer halls, isolated farm retreats or the margins of European political discourse. They are moving closer and closer to the mainstream.

In fact, this newfound political confidence is reflected in the street, where more and more Jews are being physically and verbally attacked in the open.

The Golden Dawn party in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary and Svoboda in Ukraine are just three examples of European political parties that have moved well beyond the historic far right and still unacceptable discourse of those like Le Pen’s National Front in France and the Freedom Party in Austria.

We appear to be entering a new phase in European political history that has extremely worrying parallels with the past. Of course, many will argue that none of these parties currently have great power...

A few days ago, security guards were patrolling the streets near Rome’s Jewish school with metal detectors, searching for possible explosive devices. Rome’s largest synagogue, one of the oldest in the world, today looks like a military outpost, with private guards and policemen at every corner. The Jewish school is also a “sterilized area,” protected by bodyguards and cameras, the windows plumbed with iron grates. I saw the same in the Jewish homes of Hebron and in the schools of Sderot, the Israeli city bombed by Hamas.

The March attack at a Jewish school in Toulouse, which resembled that of Itamar (when an Israeli father, mother and three children were slaughtered in their beds by a Palestinian commando), triggered “an explosion” of anti-Semitic attacks across France. According with the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive, more than 90 anti-Semitic incidents took place in France only in the 10 days that followed the shooting, which left four people dead. In total, 148 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in March and April. It’s an anti-Semithic pandemonium totally silenced by the European media.

Anti-Semitism raises again its head in estern Europe. During the Holocaust, Europe dispatched its Jews to the gas chambers. Seventy years later, in the welfarist, multicultural and semi-Islamicized Europe, Jews have again come under attack. Enclaves of ultra-Orthodox Jews will likely survive in the main cities, but Jewish life as such has no future in Europe.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the world’s leading Talmudic scholar, delivered this apocalyptic vision: “The Jewish community in Europe is dying.” All the recent polls say that a third of Europeans show very high levels of anti-Semitism, while over half of Europeans view the State of Israel as “the greatest threat to world peace.”

Turns out you don't need to raise the specter of scary Aryans perhaps rising yet again. In any event, by the time they'd gain power of any significance (if, in fact, they ever do, which is by no means a sure bet), the Jews will likely be long gone, chased off by the Zion-loathing leftist and Islamist hordes.And then there's the matter of Jewish pseudo-Zionists and anti-Zionists, the ones who are far more persuasive than today's Aryans are ever likely to be in fomenting hatred against and working toward the delegitimization of Israel. (The following is a passage from the review of Robert Wistrich's latest book, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel, in Commentary):

While tension between Zionists and Jewish anti-Zionists can be traced back as far as the first large-scale European migration to Palestine at the end of the 19th century, the attempt to widen this divergence in the present day, particularly by radical anti-Zionist Jews who are the modern heirs of [Austria's Bruno] Kreisky and [Rosa] Luxemburg, serves only to jeopardize the well-being of the Jewish people. Whereas the anti-Semitism of swastikas and ghettos was intended as the separation of the Jewish people from humanity, the progressive bigotry of far-left anti-Zionists separates the Jewish nation from the nations of the world, and cleaves Jew from Jew in a process, a violation of the Torah's sacred injunction: Lo telech rachil b'ameicha ("Do not be a talebearer among your people.")...

From Ambivalence to Betrayal is a landmark work on left-wing anti-Semitism, and its rich tissue of historical analysis provides a starting point from which to understand the new forms of Jew-hatred that metastasize every day. But the book's true value rests in its lucid, judicious and damning critique of radical Jewish anti-Zionism, a curse in the best of times but a dangerous ideology that is ill afforded in the worst. When we survey the rising tide of Judeophobia in the op-ed columns, the academy, the culture, and the cafes and parliaments of Europe, we can see where the delusions of the radicals have led.

In other words, Canada's intrepid Nazi chasers to the contrary, in our time scary Aryans are the least of our worries.